


Against All Odds

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Animal Transformation, Fandom Trumps Hate, Fluff, Gen, I think I'm funny, LITERALLY, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Reunions, because steve is turned into a cat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22055629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Steve wakes up feeling so terrible that his first thought is that the serum somehow has worn off. His second thought, when he opens his eyes to see hard grey pavement, is that maybe he’s been sent back in time. He’d definitely spent a few nights next to trash cans in seedy alleys in the 30s, and stranger things than time travel had happened in his life so far. What was one more thing to add to the list?When he manages to wrench his head downwards enough to look at himself, though, he realises pretty quickly that he’s an idiot.And that he’s a cat.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 32
Kudos: 374
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	Against All Odds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mari_Knickerbocker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mari_Knickerbocker/gifts).



> many thanks to mari for bidding on me and waiting so patiently for the fic to appear, and to cats, for being great little inspirations. love those little furballs

Steve wakes up in a back alley, his body aching all over and his head throbbing like the blazes, and it takes him a second to even realise that something is wrong. When he tries to move, it’s - a wave of nausea rockets through him at top speed, like it really has somewhere to be, and Steve wishes it would get there and leave him alone. Something extremely weird had happened, evidently. He feels light; his feet feel strange. There’s a garbage can very near by, he can smell it.

His first thought is that the serum has worn off somehow and he’s just managed to forget how crappy fallen arches feel. His second thought, when he opens his eyes to see hard grey pavement, is that maybe he’s been sent back in time. He’d definitely spent a few nights next to trash cans in seedy alleys in the 30s, and stranger things than time travel had happened in his life so far. What was one more thing to add to the list?

When he manages to wrench his head downwards enough to look at himself, though, he realises pretty quickly that he’s an idiot.

And that he’s a cat.

Well. He’s not entirely sure that he could say _stranger_ things than animal transformation had happened to him, but equally strange things definitely had. What was one more to add to the list?

Carefully, he flexes a hand - paw? A paw. A row of little claws pop out from some heretofore unknown pocket of himself, which he’s not sure he likes. Then he swipes the air a few times and decides he does like. If he’s going to be stuck as a cat, twenty claws make for something of a bonus, and an advantage.

It’s an awful process to haul himself upright: he has to get all four legs underneath him, somehow manage his tail, keep his head from dipping and weaving as it wants to. He staggers drunkenly a few times, but slowly his brain clears and his feet steady. His command over his body - the third body he’s inhabited - grows a little more certain. He takes one step and then another, and then he finds he can walk around all right as long as he doesn’t try to think too hard about the actual proper mechanics of walking because when he does he inevitably messes something up and trips directly on his face.

His memories of morphing into a cat and getting here are utterly unclear, but this is not as concerning as it might otherwise be because he never could manage to remember what had happened in the Vita-Ray tube except for blinding light and a lot of pain. The last thing that he _can_ remember is a training session: Wanda’s face, scowling in concentration, and red ribbons of magic streaming out of her hands and towards him. And then - it’s just blackness until he’d come to. It calms him, somehow; he still doesn’t have the faintest clue of where he is or how he’d ended up here, but if it’s because of Wanda’s magic then it’s probably all right. Or, at least, he can be fairly certain that there wasn’t any malevolent intent involved, and that the team at least know to look for him.

When he sits down his tail comes curving around to rest neatly on his paws, as though of its own volition. He blinks at it, and then dismisses it. His first order of business has to be finding out where he is; the second will be to figure out how to get back to Avengers Tower. He hauls himself to his feet again, intending to find a street sign or something of the sort, when a sudden tremor in the pavement beneath him sends him scrambling back to the safety of the trash can.

Unfortunately, the few minutes he’s had to acclimate to his new body has not extended him perfect grace at all times; what is meant to be a run behind the trash can turns into a run directly into it, and the clanging echo of the lid hitting the ground is exactly as attention-grabbing as Steve hadn’t wanted to be.

There’s a short pause in which Steven hears nothing but silence, and for a moment he dares to hope that whatever had caused the vibration - a person? - had gone, but then there’s a sound, a susurration of clothes, like someone standing from a crouch. And then there are several more sounds that are evidently footsteps, as someone approaches the mouth of the alley. Steven shrinks back into the wall behind him as a pair of human legs rounds the corner.

Another pause, and Steve has just gotten his hopes up for the second time that the person will just go away when they crouch and make unerring eye contact with him.

Every hair on Steve’s body - which is significantly more of a statement ever since a few minutes ago - stands on end. He knows those eyes; he knows that face.

“Bucky?” he tries to say, but it comes out as an astonishingly pathetic noise instead, something that probably wouldn’t even qualify as a meow. It sounds like a cat trying to talk, which is exactly what it is, and that turns out not to be a good sound at all, not even to his own ears.

Bucky’s face goes soft. The contents of Steven’s entire body go soft in response. “Hey, cat,” Bucky whispers, very quietly.

Steve meows. It is a passable noise. At the very least, he doesn’t sound half-strangled. Then, because he evidently has no self-control, he runs to Bucky and rubs his entire face on the ankle closest to him, covered by a fairly intimidating boot though it is. Bucky smells like _Bucky_ , a little bit of citrus mixed in with leather and honey and the new unfamiliar smell of metal underneath it all. Steve has to sit down, under the weight of his emotions. It’s been far too long.

“Oh,” Bucky says, in that tone he has for when things don’t go as he expects them to. “Hello. You’re...affectionate.” Steven contemplates trying to hiss at this comment, but ultimately the costs outweigh the benefit, and he just ends up headbutting Bucky once again. Bucky extends a cautious finger and touches his head. When this doesn’t meet with any objection, he starts petting with a pleasingly regular rhythm.

Unexpectedly, Steve’s very glad that he’s a cat; cats don’t have tear ducts which threaten betrayal at any slightly charged moment of emotion.

Then Bucky ruins the moment by removing his hand and standing. It takes Steve a second to realise that he’s going to _walk away_ , the concept is so baffling, and when his brain finally catches up to the world around it Bucky is already several meters away and doing some sly half-turn to pretend that he’s not looking back.

Steven screeches as indignantly as he knows how. Bucky falters, and looks back properly. Steve gets to his feet, but sits back down just as fast; as much as he _wants_ to run after Bucky it feels weird to do that, given that Bucky thinks he’s just a regular cat. Maybe, he thinks with some agony, the decent thing to do would be to let Bucky go. Would it be more or less weird to he let Bucky leave now only to track him down later? He does know that much about himself; he’s a little ashamed to admit it, but knowing that Bucky is in the same city, it’d be impossible not to look for him. Like a scab he’s not allowed to pick at. He’d been the worst at that back in the day; Bucky had always been slapping his hands away from making his red raw skin even worse.

Steve’s so busy trying to wrestle with the moral ramifications of having been turned into a cat and getting close to Bucky under the pretense of, well, being a cat, that he doesn’t notice that Bucky’s turned around until those boots are in front of him again. He looks up, and Bucky is looking down at him.

“You don’t fool me,” Bucky says. “You’re fine. You were walking fine. You look pretty well-fed.”

“Meow,” Steve says again, and this time he’s positively got the hang of the sound.

Bucky crouches again, soft touch that he is. The moral ramifications are probably fine as long as they stay here? Steve is very aware that he’s reaching. “No collar,” Bucky says, almost absently, and his hand reaches out again to touch the aforementioned collar-less neck in question. Steven leans into the contact, can’t help it. God, he’s missed Bucky. Maybe Wanda had been trying to grant a wish and it turned out that this was the best she could do, some kind of careful-what-you-wish-for thing. Even in that case this would be fine, Steve thinks. This would be plenty. He would’ve accepted this deal if he’d known the terms. He would have accepted the deal on worse terms. He rams his head against Bucky’s hand.

Bucky stands up again and Steven meows again in response, mournful.

“Don’t meow like that at me, cat,” Bucky mutters, but he doesn’t move away; he always had been a soft touch. Steve blinks up at him. Bucky scowls. “Don’t look at me like that, neither.”

He turns on his heel and leaves. Somehow, Steve manages not to cry out after him.

It only takes as long as the next corner for his resolve to crack, for him to hurry after Bucky on quiet feet. Even as he goes, he tries his best to rationalise the decision: telling himself that he just wants to see that Bucky is all right, that he’s doing well, that he’s living in an okay place and taking care of himself, and then, he tells himself, he’ll leave Bucky alone and not stalk him in the form of a cat.

What he doesn’t count on is being seen. In all honesty, he’s not sure how Bucky does it; sure, Bucky is a legendary assassin, and sure, Steve is a little awkward in his new body, but his sharp eyes and newly advanced sense of smell mean that he can track Bucky from a fair distance, and cats are small and quiet creatures almost by design. All that Steve is sure of is that Bucky gets to a small apartment building, climbs the stoop, and then climbs back down to turn and make unerring eye contact with Steve.

“Well, you may as well come in, if you’re going to twist my arm about it,” he says, and taps his thigh. “Come on, cat.”

Caught out, there isn’t much left for Steve to do but slink out from behind the corner he thought was doing such a good job of shielding him. Bucky’s face is indulgent, almost a smile as he waits patiently for Steve to come over.

“Come on,” he says again, going up the stoop again to open the door for Steve. “You’re lucky my landlady’s nice.”

Steve meows again, walks past Bucky with his head held as high as he can manage, under the circumstances. It’s something of a relief to be invited in; it doesn’t make a difference, really, he knows that, but it does make him feel a little better about the whole thing regardless.

“Don’t think I’m not going to keep an eye out for missing posters,” Bucky says as he heads across the foyer to a small door, ostensibly to Steve, though he sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself. “There are plenty around, you know.”

Steve doesn’t dignify that with a response, twisting himself around Bucky’s ankles to see if he can cause a fall. Predictably, Bucky navigates this new obstacle without even having to look down, and Steve is the one who nearly topples over.

Bucky’s flat is - well, not as dire as the visions that Steve’s imagination had conjured up, but even he had to admit that this is not a very low bar. His imagination had been presenting harrowingly dirty spaces, Bucky living inside an abandoned storage unit, Bucky living under a bridge, Bucky living in a bomb shelter or a trench or some other equally improbable place that his teammates assured him no longer existed, at least not in the way he thought about them. It hadn’t seemed to matter, whatever they said; Steve’s brain would spring to what he knew, and then attempt to worsen it by a factor at least in the triple digits.

The reality that he’s presented with, on the other hand - it’s better. It’s tiny, which gives it a passing resemblance to the tenement they’d lived in together, but the wallpaper’s different, the floor’s different, the lighting’s different, and after a point sheer crampedness had to stop being enough to draw a direct line of similarity.

Besides which, their tenement flat had been decorated to the point of being cluttered; Bucky had liked to take Steve’s drawings out from their latest hiding place and stick them up on the walls. These walls are almost tragically spartan, as are the floors; there isn’t a shred of personality in the whole place. Steve tries to make a tragic noise and gets only an odd look for his efforts.

“Don’t tell me you want out again,” Bucky mutters, opening the door again. Steve glares, and the door is shut; Bucky heads across the room to haul the window open instead, and points at it. “You’re lucky I live on the first floor, too. Out’s that way now.” Steve sits even more stubbornly where he is, and keeps glaring. Bucky huffs out an amused breath, unperturbed, and leaves the window open as he goes to rummage through the pantry. Steve comes to two realisations, then, at once: one, he’s really very hungry; two, that there is nothing in the pantry for him to eat. Bucky seems to be subsisting mostly on fresh produce and grains. He stares from Steve to the cupboard to Steve again in a way that would almost be comical if Steve wasn’t so goddamn hungry right now, and unwilling to take the chance that Wanda had given him a magical digestive system.

There is a healthy amount of grumbling involved, but Bucky has always been a sucker for a pair of big blue eyes. It’s not long before he hauls himself out the door again to go find food suitable for a cat - he tells Steve to stay put, of course, but he doesn’t shut the window, so Steve jumps out of the open frame and follows him.

~*~

It’s a funny sort of learning curve, living with Bucky again. He doesn’t take very good care of himself, Steve notes with grim resignation. He doesn’t eat or drink enough for a regular person’s diet, let alone a supersoldier’s. He doesn’t sleep through most nights, and during the daylight hours he’s quiet and withdrawn at best. Sometimes he simply disappears, out of the window or out the door fast enough that Steve can’t follow him and can’t find him; sometimes he spends the day at his crappy little laptop, digging through the remnants of HYDRA intel, or just walking in silence until Steve, following, thinks his paws may fall entirely off, doing circuits around what he eventually realises is Bucharest, Romania. The worst times, though - the worst times are when he just sits, still as a statue for hours at a time with his eyes turned inwards.

Naturally, Steve embarks on a campaign to improve this situation.

The first and most important task which he appoints himself is that of staying near Bucky. Of bothering him, in blunt terms. He makes a perfect nuisance out of himself every time Bucky starts to get that faraway look in his eyes, biting, climbing, and batting at any body part within reach and even some that aren’t. He claws his way onto Bucky’s lap even when - or especially when - there is no such lap because Bucky is standing up. 

He makes a perfect nuisance of himself, but for his part Bucky only ever seems pleased to indulge Steve. The small smile which crosses his face when Steve finds some new way to demand attention, or when Steve topples off the precarious hold he has on Bucky - it’s worth the indignity of every failure and the effort of every new attempt. And Bucky, for his part, does his best to make the flat as cat-friendly as possible, which has the positive side effect of making the place look a little more lived-in, a little less spartan.

The one thing that Bucky tries to be firm about is the bedroom. That is: Steve is not allowed inside. The door to it remains firmly shut; the few instances that it is opened reveals a room that is depressingly plain but otherwise unremarkable, but Bucky acts for all the world as though there’s something to hide in there, particularly after bedtime. Plaintive noises don’t stir him, attempts at trickery are firmly thwarted, and even when Steve hurls himself bodily at the door all he gets for his troubles is another refusal. When Steve does find his way inside, Bucky just scoops him up and deposits him back in the living room and that, depressingly, is that.

It’s made all the worse by the fact that Steve can _hear_ Bucky in there: shifting around restlessly, pacing from one side of the room to the other, muttering unhappily in his sleep. His nights aren’t particularly peaceful, which is probably why he wants to keep Steve out, but - goddamnit if it isn’t the most frustrating thing in the world.

On the third night of this bullshit, Steve parks himself outside the door and starts yowling as soon as he hears Bucky get out of bed.

“Oh my god,” Bucky mutters, his voice only slightly muffled by the door. “Cat, I promise, you don’t want to sleep in here!”

Steve yowls louder. When this has no effect he starts scratching at the door, gouging out bits of the cheap flaky wood. The upstairs neighbour bangs on the ceiling.

The door opens so abruptly that Steven nearly falls into the room. “Oh, fuck you, cat,” Bucky mutters, apparently seeing the mess Steve has caused. Steve stares up at him, defiantly unapologetic. “I’m only a goddamn renter, y’know. I have neighbours. I have a deposit.”

“Meow,” Steve says, and tries to fit _well then you shouldn’t have tried to keep me out, should you?_ into the noise. Maybe it works, because Bucky sighs and drops Steve on the bed.

“I want you to remember,” he says, pointing venomously at Steve, “that when you get woken up a million times a night, it’s your own goddamn fault. You asked for this. I tried to keep you out. Remember that, cat.”

Steve bites his finger. Bucky hisses, sounding more like a cat than Steve does, and lies down unceremoniously, leaving the door ajar. “I warned you,” he mutters. Steve curls up next to his chest, tucks his head under Bucky’s chin. It feels like old times; it feels good. He’s missed this. It’s so warm against Bucky’s shoulder that Steve would almost be concerned if he didn’t know what the serum did to a body.

Bucky’s hand comes up to pet him, long slow rhythmic strokes down his spine. He doesn’t realise he’s purring until Bucky mutters, “Loud engine,” in a voice that is very fond in the dark. Steve hadn’t even realised he could purr; he didn’t know how. As soon as he thinks about the noise his throat stutters and grinds to a stop, confused and unsure of itself. He starts up again slowly, learning his way around the new noise, this new capability. Bucky presses a smile into the top of his head. “Stubborn asshole.”

Bucky had always been a light sleeper, but it seemed that seventy years and a slew of hardships had made him a restless one, too. He tosses and turns; Steve doesn’t mind so much as worry, unhappy at the lines that carve themselves into Bucky’s face as he dreams. At first he tries to soothe Bucky just by pressing close to his side, by purring as loudly as he can, and that helps a little. Not a lot, though; not enough for Steve’s liking. If he could take the nightmares for himself he would; in the meantime, he climbs onto Bucky’s chest and sits down as firmly as he knows how. That works better. Sometimes, when those lines appear again, Steve pats them away with his paws. He’s not sure whether it has any effect or not, really - maybe he’s reading too much into it - but it seems to help. It seems to. When Bucky wakes up the first thing he does is look at Steve and smile. It’s an astonishing sight, one that has Steve purring even louder, his paws kneading with joy.

“Don’t bake me,” Bucky mumbles, and keeps smiling. His hand comes up to pet Steve, exploring the soft skin behind his ears and then running down the long expanse of his back. “Did you get any sleep at all?” Steve just keeps purring, and Bucky shakes his head. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” he mumbles. “You can nap.”

Their nights improve after this: there seems to be some soothing effect when Steve parks himself on Bucky’s chest and purrs. Bucky sleeps in longer and longer stretches; when he wakes up, he no longer gets up to pace but lets himself be pinned in place, strokes Steve contemplatively until he falls back asleep or the sun catches up to them both.

It’s something of a delight to be so pandered to, not only because it means that Steve can get close to Bucky but because it reveals the softer side to the ruthless assassin that Steve had fought in Washington, reveals the man that Steve had known so long ago. Bucky had always been soft-hearted; it seems utterly wonderful, now, that he can still be so.

Another reason that it is delightful to be pandered to: it means that Steve can keep pushing, and so push he does. Pushing, in this case, comes in the form of insisting upon being fed, with fierce applications of ankle-pawing and noise-making. Steve learns very quickly to get very good at making the plastic food bag crackle and pop, and knocking over his empty bowl at maximum volume, which is not a skill he’d ever thought he was going to have, let alone develop to perfection. Bucky picks up the hint pretty quickly after the first few instances of rowdiness, and even begins to forestall Steve’s fussing by setting a meal time each day. It’s a good development for Steve, but to his dismay the act of feeding a cat doesn’t seem to connect in Bucky’s brain with the act of feeding oneself; he seems content to sit and stroke Steve’s back and continue to utterly ignore the demands of his own body, which means further action is required.

The look that Bucky gives Steve after finding some leftover food in his bowl would have been funny if not for the undercurrent of concern. “This is very unlike you,” Bucky says slowly. Steve meows; this merely wins him a further narrowing of eyes.

Slowly, Steve walks over to the kitchen, jumps onto the counter, and pats the element carefully. It’s cold, and has been cold for days. When Bucky doesn’t react, Steve sticks his paw into the fridge and meows pitifully.

“There’s nothing in there,” Bucky says.

Steve meows _I know, that’s the goddamn problem_ but he suspects it doesn’t quite get through. In desperation, he jimmies the fridge open and sits among the empty shelves as pitifully as possible. _Look how empty this all is_ , he tries to gesture, rolling over a dead fly. _Cook something for yourself! You’re an asshole!_

This seems to get through; or something does, at least, because Bucky sighs and gets up to put his shoes on. “Fine,” he mutters. “I’ll go buy some chicken. Is that what you want?” He shifts into Romanian for the rest, but his tone makes it pretty clear the kind of sentiments he’s expressing. Steve ignores him magnanimously and trots out of the apartment after him with his tail held high.

Bucky makes exasperated-sounding conversation with the lady who owns the corner store, and she just laughs unsympathetically and points him down one of the aisles. Steve, for his part, sniffs out the bread and parks himself next to it until Bucky comes to collect him, rolls his eyes, and picks up a loaf.

Steve returns home in high spirits until Bucky cooks a small piece of the chicken and tries to offer it to him. He cannot believe that someone can be so oblivious to their own needs, for fuck’s sake.

“What?” Bucky asks again, frustrated when Steve refuses to open his mouth for the chicken. Steve paws at the bread. Bucky looks from Steve to the bread and gets up to look up whether cats can eat bread on his laptop. Steve buries his face in his paws.

The next thing he knows, he’s being offered the chicken again, wrapped in a tiny bit of bread. Very firmly, Steve pushes the proffered hand upwards until it bumps against Bucky’s mouth. Then, finally, comprehension seems to dawn.

“Oh my god,” Bucky mutters. “You want _me_ to eat?”

Steve meows affirmation. Just to make the message extremely clear, when Bucky pops the makeshift sandwich into his mouth Steve gets up and goes to take a bite of his own food.

“Fucking really,” Bucky mutters. “What a cat. You’re something, cat.” He takes another bite of the sad chicken-and-bread mashup that doesn’t deserve to be called a sandwich, and Steve responds by eating some more himself, deeply and smugly triumphant.

If nothing else, Bucky seems to realise that if he’s going to be blackmailed into eating by his cat he might as well make it pleasant for himself; his cooking starts to improve, from there, and that’s the important thing. Steve can no longer sit in the fridge because it is actually being used, which he counts as a victory.

~*~

After having adjusting his sleeping and eating habits at Steve’s demand, Bucky proves to be a perfectly receptive companion, seemingly better able to interpret Steve’s actions. Or perhaps Steve’s following demands are simply less complicated: when he lies down with his belly up Bucky takes the hint and starts petting, and when Steve wiggles despairingly around on the floor he buys a carpet and a positive fleet of blankets.

Steve’s attention turns, then, to the matter of his identity. That is, he’s in cat form, but he’s still Steve Rogers. And sure, it was fine to have run into Bucky, to have been invited into his home, but surely there was a point after which it became kind of creepy to just hang around someone in animal form without at least trying to tell them who you were. Steve was not proud to admit he had lost track of how many days it had been since he’d been abruptly felinised, but he was pretty sure he ought to get on that.

His first attempt was the laptop. This plan was discarded almost immediately: the thing was almost impossible to get open, and once Steve had managed that feat the keys were far too small for him to manage, let alone the trackpad - it was a nightmare of terrific proportions. He had to remove himself from that particular situation with all due haste or let Bucky find a destroyed computer on the ground.

His second attempt was with a sheaf of papers. All hope of using any kind of writing utensil had pretty much disappeared alongside his opposable thumbs, but he might be able to _scratch_ out a message. This, too, fails quite terribly. The paper shreds into tiny, unusable, illegible pieces, and Bucky walks in at precisely the moment that Steve is biting the remaining pieces ragefully.

“Don’t do that,” Bucky says at once, and places Steve on the couch and away from the paper. “That’s a mess.” Steve makes an angry muttering noise. He knows it’s a mess. He made the mess.

The takeaway, anyway, is that paper is a horribly fragile medium through which to convey messages, and that Steve no longer has the appropriate appendages to make it work. This stumps him for a while; he considers scratching a message into the floorboards, but ultimately decides against it unless the situation becomes desperate. Which, considering Bucky’s track record, seems like a possibility - but until they reach that point he’s a renter and he has a deposit, and Steve doesn’t want to mess either of those things up for him.

Attempt #3 is doomed from its conception and Steve knows it perfectly well, but it’s still worth a shot: he sits on Bucky and attempts to communicate his situation through body language. Even as a human he has no gestural vocabulary to communicate _Scarlet Witch_ or _accidental magic_ or even _old friend whom you know, I really promise you do_. Bucky seems to think he’s having some sort of attack, or trying to signal that something’s wrong, because he seems afraid to take his eyes off Steve for several hours.

The winning idea actually comes to Steve while Bucky is on his laptop; Steve, having commandeered his lap, has a fine view of the code that Bucky seems to be typing in; the strings of nonsensical letters are encrypted into even more nonsensical symbols and sent. Steve’s brain helpfully meanders through the codes that he knows in an idle attempt to decrypt what Bucky has sent when he strikes upon his solution and sits up straight.

Morse code. Dots and dashes. He and Bucky had both been taught it during the war, and his claws are capable of that much, surely.

Bucky makes an uncomfortable noise as Steven shoots off his lap, and then a protesting one when he reaches the stack of paper under the table. “Don’t rip that up,” he warns as Steve grabs one and runs to the yielding material of the carpet.

With very careful, very precise movements, Steve’s claws are indeed capable of poking dots through the paper. Dashes end up being three dots so close to one another that they become one longer dot; this is fine, it’s still legible. Bucky comes over curiously just as Steve is finishing up his message.

He’s expecting any number of reactions, but the sudden appearance of a knife isn’t one of them. “Who taught you that,” Bucky demands, and then shakes his head and makes for the window. Steve yowls out a protest, pained, and he stops. He stops.

It takes another half hour of relentless pacing, of disbelieving questions, of general wariness for Bucky to so much as approach Steve again, let alone trust him or believe him.

“This is insane,” he mutters, and Steve gives him a sardonic look: is there anything in their lives that _isn’t_ insane? Bucky snorts, and then frowns - at himself, and at Steve. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah, I can see it.” He shakes his head again. “I hope that’s a good thing.”

Steve tries to emanate affirmation with his entire being. He reaches out hesitantly with one paw, a question, and Bucky beckons him back into lap position.

“I guess we should try and figure out some kind of plan. How do you undo this?” He frowns. “Is there a way to undo this?”

Steve shrugs. And so begins a planning session which is stretched out from sprint to marathon because Bucky has to phrase everything into a yes/no question. Eventually, though, they get through all the pertinent facts: yes Steve does have an idea as to how he can be returned to his normal body, no he’s not certain about it, yes it involves seeing someone, yes the someone is an Avenger, yes this means travelling to New York.

“I hope you know you’re the only person I’d even consider doing this for,” Bucky grumbles. Steve presses his face into Bucky’s chin and purrs, and is not pushed away.

~*~

Wanda is so relieved to see the two of them that she has to sit down. “It was a mistake,” she says at once.

“I kind of figured,” Bucky says. “Can you fix it?”

Wanda gets that set to her jaw which Steve has grown familiar with in the course of training her. “Of course I can,” she says. Steve watches as she closes her eyes, settles into her own magic, and sends those red tendrils outwards. He’s absurdly proud; even as Bucky stiffens and tenses, Steve is mostly thinking about how she’s clearly using some of Natasha’s techniques to focus. Barely a handful of seconds after he’s enveloped in the red mist, he’s human again.

“Well,” he says. “That seemed easy.”

Wanda is back to sheepish in a second. “It was?” she offers. “The first time, you asked me to set you on the most unlikely course to help your friend. That was difficult. I slept for three days after. This was easy.” She pauses for a second, and then corrects herself. “Easier. I’m very hungry now.”

“Part of Wanda’s magic deals with probabilities,” Steve says to Bucky, who nods slowly. “Thank you, Wanda.”

“It was good training,” Wanda admits, and then excuses herself to go make a fantastically large lunch - which, she makes quite clear, neither of them are allowed to partake in, after having caused her so much fatigue. This seems fair enough.

“So,” Steve says, turning to Bucky, trying his very best to remain calm. “You got any plans?”

“Don’t try to be subtle,” Bucky advises. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“Don’t prevaricate,” Steve says right back, and forces himself to stay standing where he is, to not move closer. “I just - I don’t want to make you feel forced into coming back. You can, you know. Leave. If you want.”

“That looked like it hurt to say.”

“Stop being a jerk,” Steve says desperately. “I’m trying to be nice, here.”

“So’m I,” Bucky says. Hesitates, and chews his lip in that way he does when he’s about to say something personal. “I thought it was best for me to live alone. Stop running the risk of hurting people I - care about.” He pauses again, and then says, “Only there was this punk of a cat that kinda disabused me of that idea.”

Steve grins so hard that his cheeks start to protest. “Sounds like you owe this cat a lot.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, eyes soft and sincere. “Yeah, I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> wanda's powers are fully bonkers in all canons so i just cannibalised the comics and claimed she can do weird stuff with probabilities. heck yeah
> 
> i can sometimes be tracked down on the [tweet times](https://twitter.com/layersofsilence)


End file.
